Conventionally, the process of producing an audio/visual work such as a commercial, an infomercial, a television program, or a movie has involved recording and capturing the necessary content for both the audio and visual material, editing the content to produce a draft version of the finished work, and circulating the draft versions of the finished work for review to solicit approval for the work before distribution. Typically, the last step of reviewing the draft versions involves multiple iterations of review.
The review process is time intensive since multiple reviewers are involved, who are usually in different geographical locations. To distribute the work, tapes must be sent out to each reviewer, which in itself is time consuming. For efficiency sake, the reviews are generally performed in an ordered fashion to avoid conflicting change requests that might create delays. At each reviewing level in the hierarchy, a new set of tapes must be created that reflect the prior requested changes.
If the reviewer's comments are in the form of handwritten notes or voicemail, it may be difficult to correlate the comments to the precise location in the work. In order to assure accuracy of the comments at the frame level, the reviewer and the editor may need to review the work together on the phone. While this collaboration produces the desired result, it is also costly in time and expense, and again submits to the possibility of a misunderstanding.
What is needed is a Review and Approval system that permits efficient access by multiple reviewers to the content to be reviewed, and that promotes accuracy in correlating a reviewer's comments with the appropriate portion of the content. In particular, the comments should correspond to an individual frame of the content under review or a sequence of frames. Comments may then be saved and made available for later review.